NIAID New Innovators Awardees

Robert K. Abbott, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas

Project Title: Revealing the Biophysics of the Germinal Center Microenvironment

Award Year: 2021

Contact: rkabbott@utmb.edu
Dr. Robert Abbott is a B cell immunologist and Assistant Professor is the Department of Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.

Learn more about Robert K. Abbott, Ph.D.

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Billur Akkaya, M.D., D.Phil.

Department of Neurology, Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity, Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology, The Ohio State University College of Medicine

Project Title: Deciphering the Specificity and Molecular Mechanisms of Regulatory T Cells Using Novel Approaches

Award Year: 2022

Contact: billur.akkaya@osumc.edu
The primary objective of Dr. Akkaya's laboratory at the Ohio State University is to unravel the intricate molecular mechanisms underlying the interactions between Tregs and antigen-presenting cells in the context of autoimmunity and cancer.

Learn more about Billur Akkaya, M.D., D.Phil.

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Sean Arayasirikul, Ph.D.

University of California, Irvine (UCI)

Project Title: One Ballroom: Understanding Intersectional Stigma to Optimize the HIV Prevention Continuum among Vulnerable Populations in the United States

Award Year: 2021

Contact: sean.arayasirikul@uci.edu
Dr. Sean Arayasirikul is a Medical Sociologist in the Department of Health, Society, and Behavior in the Program in Public Health at the University of California, Irvine. They are deeply committed to teaching and mentorship as a community-grounded scholar, having come from the communities they collaborate with and serve in their research.

Learn more about Sean Arayasirikul, Ph.D.

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Samantha L. Bell, Ph.D.

Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences

Project Title: Investigating the Role of Liquid-liquid Phase Separation in the Interaction Between Mycobacterium Tuberculosis and Macrophages

Award Year: 2021

Contact: samantha.l.bell@rutgers.edu
Dr. Samantha Bell’s research program seeks to untangle how macrophage responses to Mtb are initiated and regulated and how Mtb uses secreted effectors to subvert host responses and cause disease.

Learn more about Samantha L. Bell, Ph.D.

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Nicholas Bessman, Ph.D.

Center for Immunity and Inflammation, Department of Medicine, Rutgers Health

Project Title: Immune Regulation of Tissue Iron in Health and Disease

Award Year: 2021

Contact: n.j.bessman@rutgers.edu
Dr. Bessman founded his independent laboratory at Rutgers University in 2021. The goal of the lab is to understand the molecular basis of intestinal health and disease.

Learn more about Nicholas Bessman, Ph.D.

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Cara E. Brook, Ph.D.

University of Chicago

Project Title: Crossing Scales to Predict and Prevent Bat Virus Zoonoses in a Madagascar Ecosystem

Award Year: 2022

Contact: cbrook@uchicago.edu
Cara Brook’s lab studies the ecology and evolution of zoonotic diseases, with a particular interest in viruses that transmit from wild bats to humans.

Learn more about Cara E. Brook, Ph.D.

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Chrysothemis Brown, M.B.B.S., Ph.D.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Project Title: Acceptance of Non-Self: Decoding Intestinal Immune Tolerance During Early Life

Award Year: 2022

Contact: brownc10@mskcc.org
The goals of Dr. Brown’s research program are to understand how signals from the tissue environment shape the fate and function of immune cells and the mechanisms by which the immune system reciprocally regulates tissue homeostasis and host immunity.

Learn more about Chrysothemis Brown, M.B.B.S., Ph.D.

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Allison Carey, M.D., Ph.D.

University of Utah

Project Title: Parallel Phenotyping to Dissect Genetic Determinants of Bacterial Strain Diversity

Award Year: 2022

Contact: Allison.Carey@path.utah.edu
Allison Carey’s lab at the University of Utah uses advanced genetics and genomics to study clinically relevant phenotypes such as antibiotic resistance, virulence, and vaccine escape in pathogenic mycobacteria.

Learn more about Allison Carey, M.D., Ph.D.

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Iain C. Clark, Ph.D.

UC Berkeley

Project Title: Decoding the Language of Inflammation Between Central Nervous System Resident Immune Cells

Award Year: 2021

Contact: iain.c.clark@berkeley.edu
Iain Clark’s lab combines tools from multiple disciplines - genomics, microfluidics, molecular biology, and engineering - to study infectious diseases, central nervous system inflammation, and cell-cell interactions.

Learn more about Iain C. Clark, Ph.D.

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Kiera Clayton, Ph.D.

Department of Pathology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School

Project Title: Characterizing Macrophages as "Hide-Outs" for Chronic Pathogens

Award Year: 2021

Contact: kiera.clayton@umassmed.edu
By studying macrophages as “hide outs” for multiple pathogens, the goal of the Dr. Clayton’s lab is to uncover common mechanisms of resistance to killing, which can then be targeted for the development of therapies.

Learn more about Kiera Clayton, Ph.D.

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Jishnu Das, Ph.D.

University of Pittsburgh

Project Title: Using Three-dimensional Protein Networks to Uncover Immuno-modulatory Molecular Phenotypes in Infectious Disease

Award Year: 2021

Contact: jishnu@pitt.edu
Jishnu Das’s computational systems immunology lab focuses on the development and use of novel machine learning approaches to analyze high-dimensional multi-omic datasets to identify molecular phenotypes in immune regulation and dysregulation.

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Allison Didychuk, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Yale University

Project Title: Dissecting the Mechanism of Herpesvirus Genome Packaging

Award Year: 2022

Contact: allison.didychuk@yale.edu
Allison Didychuk’s lab in Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University uses diverse approaches ranging from structural biology to functional genomics to understand late stages in the herpesvirus lytic cycle.

Learn more about Allison Didychuk, Ph.D.

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Nir Drayman, Ph.D.

Project Title: Harnessing Cell-to-Cell Variability to Understand Viral Infection Outcomes

Award Year: 2022

Contact: nirdra@uci.edu
Dr. Drayman’s lab focuses on developing new approaches to interrogate virus-host interactions at the single cell level, by combining viral genetics, single-cell RNA-sequencing, microfluidics, live-cell imaging, and machine learning, using Herpes Simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) as a model system.

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Kevin Forsberg, Ph.D.

Project Title: Discovery of Bacterial Defense and Phage Counter-Defense Strategies

Award Year: 2021

Contact: kevin.forsberg@utsouthwestern.edu
Kevin Forsberg is on the faculty at UT Southwestern in the Department of Microbiology where his lab studies this molecular arms race, perhaps the longest-running evolutionary conflict on Earth.

Learn more about Kevin Forsberg, Ph.D.

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Gaurav D. Gaiha, M.D., D.Phil

Ragon Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Project Title: Exploiting Highly Networked CTL Epitopes to Achieve a Functional HIV Cure

Award Year: 2020

Contact: ggaiha@mgh.harvard.edu
Gaurav D. Gaiha, M.D., D.Phil, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Principal Investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT and Harvard and Attending Physician in the Division of Gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital. His lab’s work is focused on the development of novel T cell-based vaccines for HIV and other infectious diseases by eliciting responses that target epitopes derived from structurally constrained viral regions.

Learn more about Gaurav D. Gaiha, M.D., D.Phil

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Pascal Geldsetzer, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.

Division of Primary Care and Population Health, Department of Medicine, Stanford University

Chan Zuckerberg Biohub – San Francisco

Project Title: The Impact of Clinical Interventions for Sepsis in Routine Care and Among Detailed Patient Subgroups: A novel approach for causal effect estimation in electronic health record data

Award Year: 2022

Contact: pgeldsetzer@stanford.edu
Pascal Geldsetzer is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and, by courtesy, of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University.

Learn more about Pascal Geldsetzer, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.

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Rory Henderson, Ph.D.

Duke Human Vaccine Institute

Project Title: Assessing HIV-1 Broadly Neutralizing Antibody Association Pathways for Vaccine Immunogen Design

Award Year: 2021

Contact: rory.henderson@duke.edu
Rory Henderson’s laboratory uses an integrated structural biology approach to design vaccine antigens.

Learn more about Rory Henderson, Ph.D.

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Sizun Jiang, Ph.D.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School

Project Title: Spatial-Temporal Dissection of Stratified Host Tissue Responses to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Related Coronaviruses in Situ to Understand Intra-host Pathogenesis

Award Year: 2022

Contact: sjiang3@bidmc.harvard.edu
The Jiang lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School focuses on the intersection of host-disease interactions through the development and application of novel spatial technology platforms and computational algorithms.

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Kristin D. Lane, Ph.D., M.S.

Idaho State University 

Project Title: Molecular Analysis of Malaria Mitochondrial Gene Regulation

Award Year: 2022

Contact: kristinlane@isu.edu
The Lane lab studies molecular genetics and fundamental biochemical pathways of non-model human pathogens, using interdisciplinary approaches to identify new targets to exploit for drug development to circumvent antimicrobial resistance.

Learn more about Kristin D. Lane, Ph.D., M.S.

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Nathan C. Lo, M.D., Ph.D.

Stanford University

Project Title: Real-Time Predictive Modeling for Public Health Departments to Control Infectious Diseases

Award Year: 2022

Contact: Nathan.lo@stanford.edu
Dr Nathan Lo’s research group studies the transmission of infectious diseases with an ultimate goal of informing public health policy.

Learn more about Nathan C. Lo, M.D., Ph.D.

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Leyuan Ma, Ph.D.

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Project Title: Engineering Synthetic Cellular Crosstalk for Transplantation Tolerance

Award Year: 2022

Contact: mal5@chop.edu
Dr. Ma is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

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Shuyi Ma, Ph.D.

Seattle Children’s Research Institute; University of Washington 

Project Title: Network Dissection of Host-Pathogen Interactions in Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Infection

Award Year: 2021

Contact: shuyi.ma@seattlechildrens.org
Dr. Shuyi Ma’s current research interests lie in understanding the complex molecular interactions within and between organisms determine infection and treatment fates in hard-to-treat infections including tuberculosis.

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Lauren Ann Metskas, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Joint Appointment in Department of Chemistry, Purdue University

Project Title: Partial Maturation in Mosquito-Borne Flaviviruses: Developing new approaches to characterize the role of lattice heterogeneity in fusion, infectivity, and antibody neutralization

Award Year: 2022

Contact: metskas@purdue.edu
Lauren Ann Metskas specializes in the relationship between structure and function in large, imperfect protein assemblies, such as the lattices found in viruses.

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Patrick S. Mitchell, Ph.D.

Department of Microbiology, University of Washington, HHMI, University of Washington

Project Title: Translation of Evolution-guided Insights for New Models of Human Infectious Disease

Award Year: 2021

Contact: psmitche@uw.edu
Dr. Mitchell is focused on understanding the principles that govern innate immune detection of ‘pathogen-specific activities’ – cues that discriminate pathogens from other harmless or helpful microbes.

Learn more about Patrick S. Mitchell, Ph.D.

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Haik Mkhikian, M.D., Ph.D.

University of California, Irvine
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Project Title: Differential Regulation of T Cell Plasma Membrane Proteins by N-glycan Branching and Clathrin-mediated Endocytosis

Award Year: 2022

Contact: hmkhikia@uci.edu
Haik Mkhikian’s lab focuses on developing new approaches to study glycobiology and in understanding the role of glycans in T cell biology.

Learn more about Haik Mkhikian, M.D., Ph.D.

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Dequina Nicholas, Ph.D.

University of California Irvine, School of Biological Sciences, Department of Molecular Biology & Biochemistry

Project Title: Lipid Antigen Presentation as a Driver of T2D Inflammation

Award Year: 2022

Contact: dequinaa@uci.edu
Dr. Dequina Nicholas is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry where her lab studies the intersection of the nutrient environment, the immune system, and metabolic disease using a combination of molecular and cellular biology, transgenic mouse models, cytokine profiling, and flow cytometry.

Learn more about Dequina Nicholas, Ph.D.

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Yuri Pritykin, Ph.D.

Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and Department of Computer Science, Princeton University

Project Title: Regulatory Genomics of T cells in Mouse and Human

Award Year: 2022

Contact: pritykin@princeton.edu
Yuri Pritykin’s lab develops computational methods for design and analysis of high-throughput functional genomic assays and perturbations, with a focus on multi-modal single-cell, spatial and genome editing technologies, and applies these methods to study regulatory genomics of cell function and cell-cell interactions in vivo, with a focus on immunology and cancer.

Learn more about Yuri Pritykin, Ph.D.

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Tania Rozario, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases and Department of Genetics, University of Georgia 

Project Title: Tapeworm Stem Cells as Drivers of Regeneration and Reproduction

Award Year: 2021

Contact: tania.rozario@uga.edu
Tania Rozario’s work (re)established the rat tapeworm, Hymenolepis diminuta, as a non-traditional model to explore the molecular mechanisms that govern how tapeworms grow, regenerate, and reproduce at prolific rates.

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Jonas Schluter, D.Phil.

Institute for Systems Genetics, Department of Microbiology, Perlmutter Cancer Center, Grossman School of Medicine, New York University Langone Health

Project Title: The Unleashed Microbiome of Cancer Patients as a Discovery Platform for Rational Microbiome Engineering

Award Year: 2021

Contact: Jonas.Schluter@nyulangone.org
Guided by a vision to develop and leverage a deep theoretical understanding of ecosystems and evolutionary processes in the microbiome, the lab seeks to discover ecological interventions that can turn the microbiome into a central therapeutic target in modern medicine.

Learn more about Jonas Schluter, D.Phil.

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Jhimmy Talbot, Ph.D.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

Project Title: Mechanism of Modulation of Intestinal Immune Responses by Dietary Signals

Award Year: 2022

Contact: jhtalbot@fredhutch.org
Dr. Jhimmy Talbot studies how interactions between neurons and immune cells in the gut can help the body balance its immune and metabolic trade-offs.

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David Truong, Ph.D.

New York University

Project Title: Programmable Off-the-Shelf Dendritic Cells as an Immunotherapy Discovery Platform

Award Year: 2021

Contact: david.truong@nyu.edu
Dr. David Truong’s lab combines site-specific “bigDNA” genome writing in human iPSCs with cell state programming and synthetic genetic circuits to build universal allogeneic “smart cells” for therapeutics, diagnostics, and modeling.

Learn more about David Truong, Ph.D.

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Travis Wiles, Ph.D.

University of California, Irvine

Project Title: Connecting the Spatiotemporal Organization of Gut Bacterial Communities to the Emergence and Spread of Antibiotic Resistance

Award Year: 2021

Contact: travis.wiles@uci.edu
Dr. Travis Wiles' research program aims to piece together a multi-scale view of how host–microbe systems form and function.

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Scott Wilson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor in the Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering Department

Project Title: Tolerance-Programming Biomaterial-Based Intranasal ASIT for the Treatment of Autoimmunity

Award Year: 2021

Contact: scott.wilson@jhmi.edu
Dr. Wilson’s Lab utilizes organic chemistry to synthesize biomaterials-based immunomodulatory therapies that bias the adaptive immune response towards antigen-specific immunity or tolerance.

Learn more about Scott Wilson, Ph.D.

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Xianfang Wu, M.B.B.S., Ph.D.

Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute

Project Title: Developing a Renewable and Dissectible Human Liver for the Study of HBV/HCV Infection

Award Year: 2022

Contact: wux4@ccf.org
Dr. Xianfang Wu’s current research focuses on understanding the intrinsic differences in antiviral resistance between stem cells and terminally differentiated cells and modeling human disease using stem cell-derived multicellular culture systems.

Learn more about Xianfang Wu, M.B.B.S., Ph.D.

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Chen Yao, Ph.D.

Department of Immunology, Kidney Cancer Program, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Project Title: Harnessing Stem-Like CD8 T Cells for Immunotherapies to Eradicate HIV Reservoirs

Award Year: 2021

Contact: chen.yao@utsouthwestern.edu
Leveraging advanced computational and experimental techniques, the Yao lab focuses on uncovering transcriptional, epigenetic, and metabolic pathways that govern T cell differentiation and function during chronic viral infection and cancer.

Learn more about Chen Yao, Ph.D.

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